2010/2/2 David Palm <dvdplm / gmail.com>: > There are several pieces to this. Even if the DB encoding and collation is utf8, doublecheck that the client connection is utf8 as well ("encoding: utf8" in database.yml for a Rails app I think). Not a Rails app :-) > str.force_encoding('UTF-8') is what you want to use I think. I already tried this method, but it lead me to the following error: in `downcase!': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError). This is due to a call to str.downcase!() later in the application. Any idea to solve this ? :-) -- Xavier NOELLE